15 Sample Interview Questions To Ask Virtual Applicants

As you’re assembling your dynamic virtual team you’ll want to be able to ask them questions that will elicit the right information from them during the final interview stage of the hiring process. That means some smart questioning and that’s what we cover here with these sample interview questions.

If you have followed our hiring process via these blogs, you will have seen how a questionnaire can be submitted to applicants after the initial pre-screening has been done. This may involve around 20% of the initial volume of applicants, for instance.

Included in this questionnaire will be some details about their previous employment and you can use this detailed work history section as a great starting place to formulate some sample interview questions to ask your applicant.

There are the obvious questions regarding their reason for leaving their last job and where they would like to be in 5 years time, but here’s another 10 less obvious questions that you can ask your applicant too:

What did you like most about your previous job?

What did you like least about your previous job?

What were you major accomplishments in your previous roles?

What were the major challenges you faced in your previous job?

What were your supervisor’s major strengths and weaknesses?

Which supervisor did you like the most and why?

Which supervisor did you like the least and why?

How do you like to be managed?

How do you like to receive a job – laid out step by step or as an overview?

How do you learn best – through online videos, books, training manuals, podcasts?

What is your greatest strength?

If you had to choose between working alone or working as a team, which would it be?

How important is customer service to you?

What do you like most about the business world?

What skills would you especially like to improve?

When you deliver these questions you can add others and mix up general with specific questions. General, open-ended questions (“Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?) will help to elicit more of their own personality coming out in the response whereas closed questioning (“How old are you?) is useful for receiving specific information.

Sometimes responses may be short but make sure you get an answer and even push the interviewee a little to answer if they haven’t really volunteered any opinion. The interview might take 60 to 90 minutes and it is time well spent.

Interviewing is the final stage of the hiring process and I hope that the sample interview questions above give you some idea of how effective questioning can really draw out the character of your applicant. For more information on the hiring process and on outsourcing work to virtual staff members in general check out the The Outsource Profit Machine workshop by clicking here.

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5 Comments

Grace
on July 20, 2011 at 1:07 pm

Love the image. 🙂

One tip I’ve found useful is to start off by asking “Tell me a little about yourself.” This will break the ice and might even reveal a few things about an applicant that are worth noting.

The best question I found in this article is the one asking the best way the applicant can learn new stuff. Every person has his own way of learning things – some prefer videos while some prefer reading long text. To each his own. It is such a generous thing for the would-be employer to even consider that.

I like that too, MJ. As said in one education theory, we all have different learning styles. Plus: “What skills do you want to improve on?” As an employee, I make it a habit to take note of the things (I have learned from my past employers) I will learn from my current employer.
‘Love the image too, Grace. It’s from “Meet The Fockers” movie, right?